Stage Fright

In my English class this week, our assignment was to create an identity collage and then present it to the class; Easy right? Wrong; At least for me. While there are people who don't love anything more than standing in front of an audience and knowing that everyone is listening to them, there are others who would rather curl up in a corner and die rather than have more than 5 strangers staring at them at once. I am one of them.
Since a child, I've never liked being among a group of people who I don't know well. Quiet and shy to others, I just see myself as someone who knows their comfort zone and doesn't like to be out of it. At school, this made my problem even more difficult since we are forced to break out of our boxes and get to know those around us. Although I hated those "go around the room and tell a little about yourself" talks you have to do when you start a new class, now I see the significance in them over the years. They are supposed to make us more comfortable with not only each other, but ourselves as well. Being listened to is the number one form of respect in my book, and this is exactly doing that. Everyone seems to care, for those few minutes at least, about who you are and what you have to say.
So my point is that public speaking, as awful as it may seem to the shy ones at first, is good practice for learning how to accept others, but more importantly, how to feel more comfortable in your own skin.